From How Africa will change the world at theglobeandmail.com:

  • Nigerian phone subscribers exploded from 400,000 to 70 million in nine years, helping Mobile Television Networks become a global telecom player in the process.
  • It is a dramatic illustration that, historically, Africa’s growth has seldom been gradual but rather in leaps.
  • Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest growing population, a consumer base capable of benefiting from the diminishing costs and simultaneously pervasive benefits of technology.
  • Africa controls the world’s largest stock of precious metals.
  • To grow further, Africans need the things Europe needed after 1945: infrastructure; energy; integrated markets linked to a global economy; and a vibrant private sector.
  • Africa will become an important continent on many fronts – as a market, supplier, tourist destination, generator of ideas, source of clean energy, and home to unique biodiversity and cultures. Africa will always be humanity’s common place of origin, the unique home base for our global society.
  • Africa is already a leader in innovative uses of technology to deliver banking and financial services to the poor. The coming years will see even more innovation in putting news and information in the hands of the people. And that will build a stronger, more capable, more reliable Africa.
  • African women – by joining forces, by fighting stigma and discrimination, by changing mentalities – are rising up and should eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV by 2015. This is already happening across the continent.
  • Africa also has a chance to pioneer a new green economy. While industrialized countries remain largely dependent on coal and oil, African countries – with their abundant solar, wind and geothermal resources – can become important users and exporters of clean energy
  • But as the damage created by current models of economic growth, consumption and waste disposal and their unsustainability become more obvious in richer countries, Africa will be seen as an integral part of efforts to save the world from itself, as the globe’s largest provider of low-carbon energy, including solar, hydro and thermal.
  • At the moment, Africa is viewed as part of the problem, not the solution.
  • The big surprise is going to be the recognition that Africa is essential to a safe and secure planet.